


Just Before the Dawn

by BlindSwandive



Series: Masquerade fills [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: (Like old-school screw-a-corpse Sleeping Beauty), Canonical Character Death and Resurrection, Community: spn-masquerade, Corpses are scary though, Dubious Consent, Episode: s02e22 All Hell Breaks Loose, Fuck Or Die, Is it fuck-or-die if he's already dead?, Is it necrophilia if you're not loving it?, M/M, Necrophilia, Non-con/dub-con (corpses can't consent and Dean can't just let Sam die), Porn version of canon, Post-rigor mortis/pre-gross, Realistic depiction of a dead body so this is probably not for the squeamish, Sam's corpse is beautiful, Season/Series 02, Sleeping Beauty Elements, What a way to join a fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 12:51:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16137626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: An alternate take of Sam's death and resurrection at the end of Season 2, where Dean has to give up more than just his soul to get his brother back.





	Just Before the Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> One of two--TWO--fills I did for the 2018 SPN-Masquerade prompt: _Sam’s corpse is beautiful. Dean awakens him with a true love’s fuck._ Also my first posting of any kind for SPN fandom. Um. Enjoy?
> 
> Some of the demon-dialogue is taken directly from "All Hell Breaks Loose" and is not mine.

The stillness in Sam was what was so beautiful.

When the light had gone out of Sam's eyes, the pain had gone out of his face, too, all the hurt and anger and suffering. There was nothing left there, now, but peace. The peace of perfect emptiness.

Sam looked younger, this way. Dean could almost imagine this is what Sam would have looked like if he'd left him safe at Stanford, before, if he'd never dragged his brother back into this mess of a life in the first place. If Dean had just looked in at him through the window, instead of breaking in—if Dean had only glimpsed him, sleeping, in the dark, with the thin sliver of light from a streetlamp on a young, peaceful face, maybe Dean would have known better, would have known to let him go, to keep him safe. Maybe he'd still be alive, now.

That was bullshit, and Dean knew it. Mostly. Sam had walked back into his apartment at Stanford to find fire and blood, and if Dean hadn't been there, Sam might even have died that night. Dean might not have ever gotten the chance to save him again.

And Dean would do anything, to save Sam. He would kill; he would die; he would tear the world apart. His own soul was nothing, compared to that.

***

_"Why would I want to give you anything?" the crossroads demon asked, all vicious glee. "Keep your gutter soul. It's too tarnished, anyway."_

_Dean knew how to bluff. Dean knew how to bargain. But it didn't mean much against an adversary that could see all the cards in the deck._

_He shaved years off of his life here like it were nothing more to him than dropping a twenty on a card game. "Five years, and my bill comes due," he offered finally, as cool as he could. "That's my last offer— five years or no deal." He even thought he sounded like he meant it._

_But the demon just started walking away. "Make sure you bury Sam before he starts stinking up the joint," she called over her shoulder._

_Dean held back as long as he could, while his stomach turned, hoping by some miracle he could win at the game of transcendental chicken they were playing. He even let her get five, ten paces away. But the demon had nothing to lose, and Dean had already lost everything._

_"Wait!"_

_"It's a fire sale," she purred, "and everything must go."_

_Dean swallowed his humiliation. And his fear, and his pride, and his revulsion, and his terror. He swallowed his shame. "What do I have to do?"_

***

Sam was pale, now, bloodless, and his skin was as cool as the time he'd fallen asleep on the hood of the Impala watching stars fall. 

That time, Dean had given Sam his first beer. Sam was way too young, though not younger than Dean had been when he'd had his first, and everything had been so peaceful that Dean had got caught up in the meteor shower overhead, not realizing it when Sam had just drifted off beside him, his hummingbird metabolism processing the alcohol more quickly than Dean would have at his age. It could only have been a half hour, or so, but it was a chilly autumn night, windy over the plains (it was always windy, on the plains), and Sam had been too stubborn to borrow Dean's jacket after forgetting his own; consequently his skin had felt cold as clay, when Dean had reached over to shake him awake, like when you woke up but one of your arms was still asleep, and outside of the sleeping bag somehow. Too cold. Wrong cold.

Sammy'd been so cold that Dean had even had a moment of stupid, blind panic, and yanked him up by one elbow into his arms, to burn the cold off of him at the point of Dean's body. He had his leather jacket wrapped around his brother, stuffing Sam's arms around his waist in the cocoon of Dean's bodyheat, before Sam was even awake enough to protest.

Sam had been fine, if groggy, though he'd bitched at Dean for a good ten minutes about waking him up so rough, and then teased him for the better part of an hour afterwards for "trying to get all 'I'll save you from the hypothermia!' on him" when it was fifty degrees out, at least, and they'd been through worse. Dean had threatened to kick him out of a moving vehicle in Minnesota, sometime—in January—and see if he still thought it was so funny then, but his relief had been so great he'd have put up with any amount of harassment.

He'd been cold for a lot longer, this time.

Dean didn't know how long he'd just sat holding vigil over Sam. Long enough for Bobby to come and go, to come back with unwelcome food and pop and some godforsaken Apocalypse to avert. Long enough for the light to change to morning and back to night, for Dean to tell Sam stories, to pet his hair away from his face, to beg him to come back, to not leave him alone like this. Long enough for Dean to beg Sam's forgiveness and decide he didn't deserve it after all, and long enough for Dean's veins to turn black, inside, and thorny, choked with poison and loathing and regret.

Long enough for him to go find a crossroads demon, and make the worst deal ever made with something as precious as a soul on the line.

Dean would make the deal a hundred times, if it would bring Sam back.

***

_"You'll bring him back?" Dean asked, only half believing._

_"I will," she said, with that false tone of pity and sensitivity. "And because I'm such a saint, I'll give you one year, and one year only. But here's the thing. If you try and welch or weasel your way out, then the deal is off. Sam drops dead. He's back to rotten meat in no time."_

_The sour taste of adrenaline was burning the back of Dean's tongue, and bile was rising to meet it. Only the shredded remains of his dignity kept him from vomiting all over his shoes._

_A year. Dean didn't want to die that soon—not when he'd have something to live for again. It wouldn't be enough to teach Sam everything he'd need to know to take care of himself in this world, not even enough to teach him how to care for the Impala. But it would have to be enough. It was all he was getting; it would be enough._

_"Fine."_

_He reached to close the distance between them, gripping her skull to drag her in for the kiss that would seal his fate. But she brought one finger up between them, pressed it to his lips to block his access. "There's just… one more thing…"_

***

Sam was still too rigid beneath him, but getting softer. He wasn't so stiff that he wouldn't bend when moved, but all the tiny hairs were still standing up on his skin, and his flesh felt just a little too unyielding, like—like clay, Dean couldn't help but think, even with as clichéd as it was, like any touch firm enough to move the muscle would leave the impression of his fingerprints on the surface, indelible proof of his culpability.

Better dented than dead.

Dean moved slowly. The demon had given him a four hour window, as part of her "generosity," and that would take him well past dawn. It had seemed absurd at the time that it would take that long, but the deal was on him like molasses, seeping ugly into his bones. He felt like he was moving underwater. 

He unbuttoned Sam's shirt ploddingly, and then started to slide it along with his jacket open and down his arms. He had to try hard not to be sick or pass out when Sam's body responded wrongly, to that, not loose and boneless like a sleeping child (how many times had Dean undressed Sam as a kid to put him to bed?), but resistant as mud, dragging and somehow heavier than it ought to be. When he finally pulled those garments free, and dragged the destroyed t-shirt off over Sam's head, Sam's corpse had collapsed back onto the mattress with a wet thud. The rest came off more easily, but no less awkwardly.

Dean had resented the demon's warning about Sam starting to smell, and he wasn't putrefying, yet—Dean hadn't sat uselessly on his ass that long, at least—but dying things voided, and if Dean hadn't been with Sam's body the whole time, and under such a heavy therapeutic dose of bourbon, the smell would have bothered him long before now. He burned Sam's clothes in the kitchen sink to get rid of the evidence, the sour and salt smell of old blood and the reek of his filth. And maybe so he could put off the inevitable just a little longer. He allowed himself the time, too, to swallow down the rest of the fifth of whiskey, but that seemed less like procrastination than a necessary precondition for what he needed to do.

There was no running water, here, but Bobby had brought in a couple of jugs of holy water from the trunk, at some point, and that would have to do. It wasn't like Dean had bothered drinking them. He carried them and then Sam's corpse into the bathroom, and bent his limbs until he fit in the tub, on his side against the sloped back. 

Dean knelt beside his brother to wash him with holy water, in some bizarre act of anointment. The rag hadn't been really clean in years, but there'd been a small bar of motel soap stashed in Sam's duffle, and together they were enough to slowly lather away all the grime. The holy water washed it all down the drain, the sweat and dirt and blood and shit, until Sam was as clean as a bride, pure and pale in the pre-dawn twilight.

He couldn't—wouldn't—return his brother to that mattress, caked in blood and worse, so Dean had pulled the cleanest seeming blanket from the trunk of the Impala (along with a change of clothes for Sam and a few other supplies) and laid it out on the floor of room that just smelled of ash, of the fire that had gutted this place a lifetime ago, and not of room temperature chicken or Sam's death. He doubled it over to soften the floor (as though Sam would care, right now), and laid Sam out like one of those saints in a sepulcher. Like Juliet, he thought, in the 60's Zeffirelli flick; not really dead, just beautiful and still and too convincing for the hero to bear.

Dean might be committing suicide, right now, but at least it wouldn't be instantaneous and devastating; he'd have a year to talk Sam out of following him into the dark.

***

_"Do you know the story of Sleeping Beauty, Dean?"_

_Dean's brain was reeling too hard to make sense of that. He gawped and said something intelligent like, "What?" and the demon laughed at him._

_"Sleeping Beauty. Little Briar Rose. Sole, Luna, e Talia," she elaborated._

_"What about it?" Dean asked, feeling like the poison in him was making him itch from the inside out._

_"It takes a kiss to wake the Princess from her death-like slumber, doesn't it?" she asked, coy and wretched._

_Dean had shaken his head, slight and stiff. "You want me to kiss him?" Fine. He could kiss his brother, to save him from death._

_The demon had made a small humming sound, considering. "Giambattista's version was a little more interesting than that. 'Crying aloud,'" she recited, "'he beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms, and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love.'" Her smile was sweet, like decay. "Isn't that beautiful, Dean? Talia's Prince Charming 'gathered the first fruits of love' from her lifeless body, then rode away."_

_Dean did throw up, then, barely breaking away far enough to keep it off of their clothes._

_The demon laughed. "I just love fairytales, don't you?"_

***

Sam was beautiful, like this, a holy temple in a burned out building.

Dean couldn't understand why he was noticing it now, other than maybe because he was sewing up his eternal damnation anyway, and what could it hurt? Whatever it was, he could see it now.

Sam was as silver as the belly of a fish, in the strange, sickly light filtering in through the half-covered window. His skin was firm and full, his lean limbs felt impossibly weighty and solid, and that damned shaggy hair Dean loved but pretended to hate was gleaming like silk. He looked like a marble statue of himself, somehow, perfected and pristine in death.

Dean would hate himself for this tomorrow; for now, he could subsume it under the haze of starvation and liquor and the naked need to have his brother back. He could drown it under the impossible loveliness of this alien thing lying beneath him. At least, he hoped, until it woke and turned back into his brother (and with any luck didn't just immediately throttle him to death). He could hold it together long enough for that.

***

_The crossroads demon had conjured a glass of something potent and burning out of nowhere, and Dean took it to rinse the taste out of his mouth. When he still had a mouth left, after spitting, he risked drinking the rest._

_"You're a sick bitch, you know that?" he asked, when his throat unclenched enough to let sound through._

_"Lucky for you, too," she replied. "We're under strict orders not to interfere with this. If I didn't have such a… let's say, 'fondness for the classics,' you wouldn't be getting this deal at all."_

_"Yeah, you're a goddamn saint," Dean growled. "You done adding screwed up shit to this contract, yet?" He got the feeling he'd gone over too easy, before; if he said yes, again, she'd only come up with something worse—if there was such a thing._

_She looked at him appraisingly, every inch the poker player trying to decide if the pot was sweet enough to call, or if there was any further she could string this out without the competition folding. After a long moment, she seemed to decide she was satisfied (thank God), and nodded. "Yes. Final offer. I'll even give you a nice round four hours to seal the deal. Besides, any longer than that and he'll really start to rot," she said, smiling unkindly. "And that's really not something you want to 'gather the first fruits of love' from."_

_Dean clenched his fists, ready to swing, to pound her meatsuit into pulp. But as much as he wanted to, he knew he had no real choice in the matter. He dove at her, crushed his mouth to hers, and sealed their fates with a kiss._

***

It took all the force of Dean's will to move. 

He tried closing his eyes, picturing girls from his porn rags. When that made his stomach slide unsettlingly sideways, he tried opening his eyes again, but focusing on small, discreet spaces instead: the length of Sam's hair, and the way it shone, unaware that all the life had gone out from under it; the spot just below the bend of Sam's elbow where the skin was smoothest; the gleam from where he was still a little damp down the middle of his chest; the cut of his shoulder. And that peace—that perfect, empty, nothing peace— in his closed eyes. That beautiful feint that Sam was somehow not in pain, not afraid, not suffering, from any of this; the promise that he would be whole again, soon, and that Dean would get 365 more days to protect him and bully him and care for him and soothe him.

With that gentle coaxing, Dean's body got shakily on board with the operation, and he settled in on his knees under Sam's cold hips. He let Sam's legs sink out to either side of him, surreal though it was that they fell too slowly, the pull of gravity buffered by the resistance of the muscles. It was almost like seeing a shot from the love scene of some obscure Weimar film, almost black and white and filmed in elegant slow-motion. Dean latched onto that idea, onto the surreality, onto the hunger-fuzziness in his brain and the broken fairytale of it all; he let it all wash over him, like a damaged parody of floating off on too many painkillers or too much blood loss after a hunt. Under that soft lens, where the barbaric could be rendered merely decadent, he could do this.

Sam—Sam's corpse—was twenty or thirty degrees too cool, in ambient sympathy with the room. And while that added to the drugged feeling, it meant Dean's cock withdrew, not the first part of him to want to retreat, but the first to manage it. He cursed, fisting it to revive it, palm wet with motel lotion he'd dug out of the trunk. Sam would still be too cold inside, though, he registered dimly; if he wasn't a little warmer inside, it wouldn't matter how hard Dean got, because he wouldn't be able to stay that way.

Utterly uncertain and unprepared, Dean covered a couple of fingers in lotion and tried to find a way to get them inside of Sam. At first he just missed entirely, glancing off, but with a mortifying peek below, he was able to at least take aim and start to push.

The sensation was—indescribable. It was a little like a hundred things but not quite like anything he'd ever felt. Somehow there was pressure against his intrusion, but not like he'd ever felt with a girl. There was solidity, but it bent around his fingers the way the rest of Sam's body did, slowly and like moving through earth. There was a wet chill, and a slickness, and Dean thought (unfortunately) of gutting fish fresh out of the water, the way you could be inside and slippery but colder than you were before.

Dean tried to clear his mind and just focus on pushing the muscle outward and away, on transferring body heat and creating warmth with friction. He thought of working knots out of Sam's shoulder after an injury; he thought of buffing scratches out of the Impala. He thought of that girl in high school who had said she didn't want to have sex with him but third base was fine, and how when he'd gotten his fingers inside of her and made her so desperate she was almost crying, she'd come around to Dean's point of view pretty quickly.

The silvery light was beginning to tinge gold, but Sam was only getting paler, greyer. Dean couldn't wait any longer. Stomach in his throat and heat in his groin, he pushed inside of Sam, hoisting his impossibly still body higher into his lap.

It was strange—too, too strange—but that unceding pressure enveloped him, held him tight and unyielding. Sam was cool inside, around him, but not so cold he couldn't keep the blood flowing where it needed to be.

Dean reached a hand up to Sam's face, trembling, and brushed his hair away from his closed eyes, needing in this moment to prove tenderness and care, even if Sam wouldn't feel it. His pale skin felt so smooth, unblemished by frown lines, perfect as stone. Dean could have been fucking a beautiful gargoyle. He was gripped by the delirious need to kiss the face below him, but he couldn't reach and still stay seated inside of Sam's body; he curled an elbow under one of Sam's legs, instead, drawing it up against invisible resistance, and laid a kiss on the inside of one knee. He left his cheek, there, just inside of Sam's thigh, and let the chill pull some of the fever from his skin. 

Dean tucked the knee over his shoulder, and shifted his hips experimentally. The rigidity in Sam's leg made it almost feel like Sam was gripping him close, when he pulled back, urging him to return. It was a strange comfort.

"Sammy…" Dean whispered, and it sounded wrong to his ears, thick and broken. He reached again to pet Sam's hair, stroke it back from the unbothered brow. "Sammy, I'm so sorry… I swear, I'm going to make everything better. Going to take care of you like I'm s'posed to."

He wanted to say more, had nothing more to say. So he rocked his hips as gently as he could while still getting enough friction to make it work. _Take care of you,_ he thought, and _Sammy,_ and _Love._

It lasted longer than he meant it to, felt like it lasted for hours—though maybe the passage of time was distorted by the light of dawn uneasily reaching out for the corners in this awful black place. The coolness held him back, worked against him, and there was a nebulous terror in his throat, though whether it was the breath of hellhounds on him or the evil of this violation, this blood crime, he didn't know. He knew he didn't care enough to be willing to stop. So he cradled Sam's hips up close, clutched his leg tight, and tried not to pray for death while he pushed for release.

The pale yellow glow of morning coming on was bringing color back into Sam's face, now, and the steady curl of Dean's body into him was warming him by fractions. Sam's hair was building an angelic halo, too, golden strands Dean had never noticed before picking up the light. Dean could almost believe it was all his doing, that he was literally fucking the life back into this precious shell, but then felt like an idiot to think it. The deal wouldn't go into effect until Dean had… met his part of the bargain, he was certain. The crossroads demon would want to be sure he didn't back out. With any luck he'd even have time to pull free, to clean up, to cover Sam with a blanket and get himself back inside of his jeans, before Sam's eyes opened.

Sam's joints were loosening by degrees, and soon Sam's leg was folding up close to his own shoulder, only the weight of gravity pulling his calf and heel down into Dean's back. Dean could almost pretend Sam was just asleep, under him, and grasped onto the perverse thrill of that, hoping it would tip him over. He palmed slowly over Sam's smooth stomach, over the tense ripple of muscle, and kissed the inside of his knee, again, scattered and lost. A peak was finally building, with such aching deliberateness that Dean was growing dizzy with it. "So sorry, Sammy," he mumbled again, drunk on it, and, "Sammy, Sammy, Sammy," like a prayer.

When he came, his eyes closed and he pressed tight up against Sam's body, letting the inexorable pressure hold him, pull everything from him like a poultice for his sin.

Then there was what felt—what really, really felt—like a spasm around his cock. 

When Dean opened his eyes, it was to see Sam's indistinctly blue ones (almost a hazeled grey in this light) fighting to focus through panic. 

"Sammy!" Dean said, eagerly, a sob hitching back in his chest. "Oh, Sammy, thank God…" He reached again for Sam's face, to soothe the fear he saw there, the confusion and streak of wildness, and also hoping it would cover his careful withdrawal from inside of Sam's rapidly heating body.

"Thank God, Sam," Dean was repeating mindlessly, and when Sam seemed to be reaching for him, leaning towards him, he bent closer to help, to be near. He gripped Sam's shoulders, trying to lift him up into a bruising hug, as two huge hands rose up slowly to wrap around Dean's throat.


End file.
